Tag Archives: French grammar
French Grammar – Past imperfect Posted by Tim Hildreth on Apr 3, 2018
Welcome to lesson 3 in our mini French Grammar series. After le passé récent and le futur proche, it’s time this week to look at the French tense known as l’imparfait. L’Imparfait (The imperfect) Like le passé composé, le passé simple, and the passé récent, l’imparfait is a tense for talking about things that…
French Grammar – Back to the future Posted by Tim Hildreth on Mar 27, 2018
Last week I kicked off a short series of posts on useful French grammar topics that sometimes get ignored. This week we head back to the future* with a look at a way to talk about upcoming actions and events that is as easy as the passé récent that we looked at last week. Le…
French Grammar – The Recent Past Posted by Tim Hildreth on Mar 20, 2018
This week I’m starting a mini-series to address some useful ways for talking about actions and events in time that don’t always gets as much attention as other tenses. First up, an easy way to talk about things that happened in the past without resorting to the passé composé or the more literary passé simple…
French Grammar – Sometimes even être needs a vacation Posted by Tim Hildreth on Mar 13, 2018
Back in décembre (December) I shared a post about how sometimes the famous “House of être” needs to make room for guests. This week we’re going to look at some examples of the opposite… when verbs that usually take the verb être to from the passé composé switch teams and take the verb avoir…
French Language and Culture – At school Posted by Tim Hildreth on Dec 12, 2017
As I’ve mentioned before, ma tante Rose (my Aunt Rose) likes to send funny jokes and pictures from the internet. Her latest courriel (email) contained an attachment that sent me off on a little bit of an internet adventure. Unfortunately it meant a lot of extra digging. Fortunately it led to some fun discoveries that I’ll…
French Grammar – Putting an addition on the “the house of être” Posted by Tim Hildreth on Dec 5, 2017
êFrench uses helping verbs to form the past tense form known as the passé compose (the composed past)*. Most verbs use avoir as their helping verb while a select group though use être. While this rule is generally true, there is a special case when even verbs that usually take avoir use être to form…
French Writer – Anatole France Posted by Tim Hildreth on Oct 17, 2017
When I’m in Paris, I love to flâner sur les quais de la Seine et faire les bouquinistes (stroll along the quais of the Seine and visit the antique book sellers/stands). During my last trip I found a little book by an author about whom I had often heard but who I had never read…